Quote Originally Posted by Redleg7 View Post
I've been a gamer for a long time starting with Avalon Hill's Panzer Blitz.

When I ran Decisive Action exercises at CGSC the students would always complain that one aspect or another wasn't "realistic" and I would tell them "No crap Sherlock it's a freakin game". My COL showed us a slide with the following quote:

All models are wrong; some models are useful.
-- generally attributed to the statistician George Box

We get pushback in regards to realism all the time. For what we are doing close enough is good enough. My question to those officers would be did you learn something useful? It's really up to the instructor to manage those expectations up front. A lot of pushback comes from "professional" modeling and sims types who have a hard time wrapping their minds around abstractions. Anyone who has played a boardgame will understand abstractions. If you look at the big sims I'd say that all of them model at the individual entity level or close to it. JWARS, WARSIM, JCATS, BBS, JANUS, etc are all entity level.
My only iisue/concern with games/sims like DA is the abstraction of realative combat power and the % losses.

Why not factor the % lost into a number of systems/soldiers/vehicles? Its a f'ing computer! Its good at keeping track. Then the Loggies folks could get their heads around the number of "runners" to keep in the fight and the number of ones to repair/replace.

Agree completly with the observation its all about commander/instructor support/buy-in. Without, the game/sim will fail.